Tag: startups

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The Wall Street Journal compiles a list of venture-back private companies, valued at $1 billion or more. There’s a table with the list of 120+ companies and an interactive chart to navigate it.

Note: This chart only includes companies that are privately held, have raised money in the past four years and have at least one venture-capital firm as an investor. Excluded from this list are companies that were majority-controlled by an institutional investment firm at one point. Only valuations confirmed by VentureSource or The Journal are included, based on direct investments, not secondary deals.

My timer for the bursting of this tech bubble currently stands at nine months. That’s when investors and venture capital markets will stop throwing around billions in Monopoly money, companies without any profits will lose their suspiciously optimistic valuations, and startups will crater. Unicorns will die, skies will fall, and parents’ basements will be resettled. We saw this with tech in 2000, with banks in 2008, and according to my Magic 8-Ball, we’re going to see it again very soon.

If I believe that I already know the answer and possess the truth, then I’m not genuinely open to learning larger truths.

This is the danger of experience. We already know better, we already know that an idea or business won’t work. This is one reason that naive, young founders are often the ones who start the most successful companies — they just don’t know any better, and they’re often too arrogant to listen to those who do.